The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

The Catholics of St. Louis have a complete educational system of their own, replacing the public school system. The German Catholics used to send their children to the public schools, but now the archbishop says, “You will be damned if your children attend the godless schools”; and the Irish and Italians and Poles, who compose the new Catholic population, bow to this threat. You might think the Catholics would at least be willing to let the “godless schools” alone, but they are not; on the contrary, seventy per cent of the teachers in the public school system are Catholics, and a good part of the board has been for a long time made up of Catholics. The purpose of this is the same as we have seen in New York and San Francisco, and shall see in Boston and Baltimore—to starve the public schools.

The extent to which this is done in St. Louis you will find difficult to believe. The people want to have good schools, and go to the polls and vote the money—and then the board of education refuses to spend the money! Recently the people passed a bond issue of three million dollars for new buildings; while I was in the city the board decided to spend only one million and a half. The people have voted an education tax of eight and one-half mills on the dollar, but the board again and again has voted to spare the poor taxpayer and save his money. There were six millions available for buildings, and no move had been made to spend them. Ten grade schools and two senior high schools had been authorized by the board the previous year, but they were not yet off the drawing-boards; and meantime all the residence districts of St. Louis are dotted with Catholic schools and high schools, and a new half million dollar Catholic high school is near completion.

I talked with Dr. Henry L. Wolfner, who is one of the best known oculists in the United States, and was until recently a member of the school board. Dr. Wolfner told me that he did not know why the board was unwilling to spend this money; he had tried his best to get it spent, he said, and the result was a long intrigue to force him off the board. When finally he resigned, the “Globe-Democrat,” organ of the gang, declared that in a letter to the board he had given ill health as his reason for resignation. This, Dr. Wolfner assured me, was an out and out lie. He summed up the situation in the St. Louis schools in two contrasting incidents: first, the courts had removed a board member because it had been discovered that the board had purchased a building site through his real estate firm; and second, the Catholic president of the school board had withdrawn from the college library a set of Havelock Ellis’ great work, “The Psychology of Sex.” These books had been in the library for many years, and were made use of by juvenile court workers, and teachers of incorrigible boys and defectives.

Dr. Wolfner told me of the efforts of the gang to get rid of one competent educator after another. They had just forced out Dr. John W. Withers, and also Dr. E. George Payne, director of the Teachers’ College. Dr. Withers wrote a letter to the papers three or four years ago, in which he showed how political graft and favoritism made impossible an honest administration of the schools. The superintendent was continually besieged by demands from the gang for favors, the appointment or promotion of this or that political favorite. The Catholics, of course, are tirelessly working for promotions for their crowd. “I wish I could bring myself to become a Catholic,” said a teacher to a friend of mine; “I would get on three times as fast.”

Also, there has been a long struggle over the question of whether graduates of the Catholic high schools should have the right to enter Teachers’ College without passing an entrance examination. Since the Catholic schools have very low standards, the educators of St. Louis have fought this, and it was on this issue that Superintendent Withers and Principal Payne of Teachers’ College were driven from St. Louis. The Catholics brought suit in the courts, and won their case in St. Louis, but lost it before the supreme court of the state. Now everybody in St. Louis rests easy, in the assurance that standards are being maintained for the teachers. But just recently the school board has thrown down the bars, and parochial school graduates are accepted wholesale. This news has been entirely suppressed by the St. Louis newspapers, so the public of that city will get from this book their first information that their school board has set aside the decision of their supreme court!

Also, of course, the book companies are on the job. Up to the year 1921 a member of the committee for the adoption of text-books was receiving a salary from the American Book Company, for spending summers in California and doing some nominal editorial work. Naturally this board was friendly to American Book Company publications. The board meets in secret, what it calls “executive meetings”; the members of the gang hold a caucus in advance, and decide what they are going to do, and make everything unanimous; so the public never finds out what is going on. This regime of graft and favoritism extends all the way down; the principals are petty tyrants, flattered and fawned upon; those teachers who are weak and subservient, and do clerical work for their principals, are the ones who get the marks. The St. Louis school system was worked out by a real Prussian some thirty years ago; it is a military affair, routine and red tape and formulas. Every year the teachers are automatically dismissed, and must be reappointed—the ideal of the “open shop” system.

Here, as usual, the teachers had to take up the fight for a living wage. No attention was paid to them, so they proceeded to organize. Miss Rosa Hesse was elected president of the teachers’ organization, and the superintendent sent for her and demanded to know if they were going to join the American Federation of Teachers; if so, every one of them would be discharged. The organizer of the teachers’ federation was barred from speaking to them. At the same time, the official representative of the Chamber of Commerce was coming and soliciting them to join his organization. It would be “advantageous,” he assured the teachers significantly. This Chamber of Commerce was deeply interested in the schools—it had been taking action to prevent the professors at the Teachers’ College using a series of text-books, “Community and National Life,” prepared by Professor Charles H. Judd, and published by the United States government; the ground of the objection being that these books intimated very mildly that labor unions had some advantage, in that they developed a sense of self-respect among laborers!

If you have read “The Goose-step” you will recollect the question raised by Professor H. L. Bolley of North Dakota: “Is a college professor a citizen?” You will remember that we cited a number of cases proving that he is not a citizen. We shall in this book consider the question: “Is a school teacher a citizen?” In St. Louis she very certainly is not, as the case of Miss Rosa Hesse proves. I had the pleasure of talking with this lady, and if it would do her any good I would cheerfully bear testimony that she is an American gentlewoman of the old school, absolutely uncontaminated by any touch of “Red”—that is, unless perchance the reading of “The Goose-step” has since affected her! At the time I talked with her, she had no idea whatever of the social significance of what had happened to her; she was simply bewildered by her discovery that a school teacher is not permitted to demand a living wage and to exercise her rights as a voter.

To begin with, Miss Hesse discovered that the meetings of the school board were supposed to be public; so she got a group of teachers to agree to attend them and see what was going on. But when it came to a showdown not one of the teachers dared; Miss Hesse went in all by herself, and gave me a comical account of the expression on the superintendent’s face when he saw her in that holy of holies. As a result of this presumption, her name was left off the list for reappointment in the year 1921. The superintendent lied to her outright about it, but one of the board members gave him away, and the protests of the teachers forced a reconsideration at this time.

But shortly afterwards an election for the school board came up, and Miss Hesse’s organization, the Grade Teachers’ Association, ventured to approve certain candidates. I am told by a gentleman of St. Louis who knows the situation intimately that in this political struggle the teachers’ organization was being misled by the “gang”; and this, alas, may be—I have seen labor unions thus used on many occasions. Anyhow, a lady by the name of Mrs. Gellhorn, president of the Missouri League of Women Voters, issued a call for a meeting of women. At this meeting the choice of the Grade Teachers’ Association was condemned; and among those endorsed was Mr. Christopher W. Johnson, millionaire basket manufacturer, and a member of the board for twenty-four years.